uy that
swamp meadow next his place on Long Island and had been dickering with
the old fellow who owns it all winter, telling him it would be a good
place to raise cranberries if it was dug out and drained, and they had
almost agreed on the price--about twice what it was worth--when down
goes Muggles to spend the night and Jerry blabs it all out, and just
why he wanted it, and the next morning Muggles, to clinch the deal and
help Jerry, slips over to the hayseed and tells him how the Sunnybrook
Club are going to buy Jerry's place, and how they wanted the swamp for
a hatchery--all true--and that the hayseed oughtn't to wait a moment,
but send word by HIM that the deal was closed, because the club-house
being near by would make all the rest of his land twice as valuable;
and the old Skeezicks winked his eye and shifted his tobacco and said
he'd think about it, and now you can't buy that sink-hole for twenty
times what it's worth, and the Sunnybrook is looking for another site
nearer Woodvale. Regular clown you are, Muggles. Exactly like that
fellow at the circus who holds up one end of the tent and then, before
the supes can reach it, drops it for the other end."

When the results of this last well-intentioned effort with its
disastrous consequences became clear to the Goat, that spotless
gentleman leaned back in his chair, threw hick his shoulders, shot out
his cuffs, readjusted his scarfpin and replied in an offended tone:

"All owing, my dear fellow, to the stupidity of the agricultural class.
I told the farmer he would regret it, and he will. As for myself, I was
awfully disappointed. I had planned to run all the way back to Jerry's
and tell him the good news before he went to sleep that night, and--"

"Disappointed, were you? How do you think Jerry felt? Made a lot of
difference to him, I tell you, not selling his place to the club. Been
a whole year working it up. It's smothered now under a blanket--about
ninety per cent of its value--and the Sunnybrook scheme would have
pulled him out with a margin! Now it's deader than last year's shad.
What the club wanted was a hatchery built over a spring, and that's why
that swamp was necessary to the deal. Oh, you're the limit, Muggles!"

It was while smarting under these criticisms that the steward one
morning in June brought him his letters. One was from Monteith--Class
of '9l--a senior when Muggles was a freshman--and was postmarked
"Wabacog, Canada," where Monteith own